The sixth and final book in the Hooded Swan series by Brian
Stableford (1975) neatly ties up space pilot Grainger’s relationship with
employer Titus Charlot and the mind parasite he calls ‘the wind’.
As before, it’s first person narrative; a narrator we’ve got
to know over the series. And as he must survive to tell the tale, Grainger can
occasionally telegraph events to come: ‘Though I didn’t know it, a fragment of
darkness from the long shadow of my past was waiting for me in the
clearing-house. It just hadn’t caught up with me, it was already ahead of me.’
(p14)
In Grainger’s absence (jail, idling, that sort of thing),
Charlot had sent off the sister vessel crewed by Eve and Captain Nick to
investigate the mysterious Nightingale nebula. They were feared lost… Grainger
realised that he might love Eve so he has to take the Hooded Swan into the nebula to track down the Sister Swan.
The Nightingale nebula is another of Stableford’s
fascinating creations, but it would be unfair to reveal more about it. Not a
nebula as we know it, a bit like a lens, but knowledge concerning its existence
might further scientific knowledge, or so Charlot believed. Grainger thought:
It could kill me. And the wind replied, ‘Time is killing everybody. Everybody
dies.’ Not much comfort there, then.
At last, more is revealed about ‘the mind’. It has been
worth waiting for. ‘I have no name’, it says… ‘We possess no shape, no form to
be labelled. We live within. What we have, and what we are, we share… I came to
you on the wind, and you think of me still as a wind that talked, not as a
being that was only a part of the wind.’ (p129)
It’s a poignant, fitting ending. About loss, life, love,
hate… and everything.
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